As if it wasn’t enough to become a bona fide New York institution for great food, music, drinks, and bowling (and have the Roots’ ?uestlove DJ every week at Bowl Train!), our friends at Brooklyn Bowl have started to take over the rest of the world, opening new locations in London and, for the past year, in the heart of Sin City.

Brooklyn Bowl Vegas, named “Best Live Music Venue” by Las Vegas Weekly, brings the winning formula of strikes, suds, and songs to a city known more for bottle service, fancy circus shows, and stand-up comedians. Did we mention their utterly addictive fried chicken, and all the other deliciousBlue Ribbon specialties? The Food Network sure did!Continue reading →

A few weeks ago the curtain came down on the fourth annual FlyCon—a yearly gathering of venue and promoter partners, agents, artist managers, and Tfly-ers here in our home city of San Francisco. This year’s FlyCon attracted nearly 400 attendees, appearances from industry heavyweights, and—because we do like to throw a good party—more beers than we could count. Read on for a full recap of an extremely educational, very productive, and just slightly raucous FlyCon 2015.

Gone are the days of not knowing the effectiveness of your paid marketing. Gone are the days of spending budget on a dedicated email blast or display campaign on your local weekly’s site and not knowing how many eyeballs saw it, how many sales it drove, and to which events. Today, it’s all about data-driven marketing!

Here are 5 steps you should take today to start making data-based marketing decisions.

Tag marketing campaign links with Source and Medium UTM codes. Want to know how many ticket sales were generated as a result of your alt weekly ad or Charli XCX’s tweet? Tag your links to see this in Backstage’s Source Performance dashboard. Learn more in this Ticketfly Community Article.

Tag artists with genre(s) when building an event. This will associate ticket buyers with a genre list so you can email them about relevant events in the future. Do you book dubstep, comedy, or 90s rock acts? Customize genres to reflect the specific talent that frequents your business. Learn more about genre tagging in the Ticketfly Community.

Ask us to implement your marketing pixels to track paid ad performance. Simply generate pixel code using your advertising platform and pass it along to your Client Rep. The two most common pixel types are conversion pixels and retargeting pixels. Conversion pixels help you measure an ad’s ROI by reporting on actions people take after ads are served (i.e., buying a ticket). Retargeting pixels help you turn window-shoppers into buyers by serving ads to those who viewed an event but didn’t purchase.

Experiment with Facebook’s advanced advertising options likeconversion tracking and custom or lookalike audiences. By placing a conversion pixel on Ticketfly’s sale confirmation pages and then adding it to your Facebook ad, you’ll know exactly which ads led to conversions (ticket sales). Custom audiences allow you to reach customers you already know with ads on Facebook. You can build audiences based on uploaded email addresses, phone numbers, or the people who visit your website. Lookalike audiences let you reach new people who are likely to be interested in your events because they are similar to your existing customers. Visit facebook.com/business to learn more.

Evaluate your performance using Ticketfly’s Source Performance Dashboard. What percentage of your ticket sales can you attribute to free search? How many ticket sales were generated as a result of amplifying your events to Facebook? Check out Backstage to view this at the Org or Event level. It’s critical to keep tabs on your performance to determine what’s working and what’s not so you know where to focus your budget and where to stop spending.

Forget the agony of not knowing if your marketing budget–and your time–are being spent wisely, and step into the world of data-based decisions and marketing. Reach out to your Client Rep with questions.

This isn’t the first time we’ve made the list, but we are glad to be a repeat recipient of this award. I think this is a good illustration of how we continue to be on the leading edge of the live events industry.

2014 was an amazing year for us and 2015 is already off to a great start. Our roadmap is full of all kinds of innovative stuff that will continue to transform how event promoters and fans experience live events.

But innovation doesn’t just happen. This is a direct result of great ideas, superb execution, and lots of hard work from the entire Ticketfly team.

The live events industry is experiencing the most fundamental technology shift that I have seen in years. We are happy to be at the epicenter of some of this change. In the end, everyone wins. It’s a great time to be a promoter or fan of live events.

Thank you, Fast Company!

For Fast Company’s full line-up of most innovative music companies, including the likes of Next Big Sound, Sonos and Spotify, read the full article here.

One hot summer night in June 1986, The Sun Ra Arkestra performed a free concert in the Naumberg Bandshell in Central Park, Manhattan—and forever changed the face of summer music in New York City. Nearly 30 years later, SummerStage (now a Ticketfly partner), has reached more than six million fans from around the world through its annual festival, which features more than 100 performances of every genre and type under the, well, sun, every year in parks across all five boroughs.

Starting today, you can snag your tickets to the very first event of the season: a benefit show on May 19 featuring co-headliners Mastodon and Clutch (which has some serious head banging potential).

“Ticketfly has quickly become a major player in the ticketing world with their ultra-easy consumer platform and robust marketing tools,” says Ian Noble, Executive Producer at City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage festival. “They are a perfect fit for SummerStage as we pride ourselves in being on the vanguard both with the artists we represent and the technology we use to produce our events. SummerStage is very pleased to have them as our new partner as we launch our 30th season.”

Welcome to the inaugural edition of #FlyFam, a quarterly roundup welcoming new partners into the Ticketfly family.

We went gangbusters in Q4 2014, signing up truly enviable and diverse partners across the continent, from a renaissance festival in Ohio, to a jazz and blues club in Washington, to a historic boat show in Philly, to a beachside concert venue in Florida. A warm welcome to all the new faces; we’re pretty excited about helping to make your lives easier, so you can focus on doing what you love best: putting on great events. Read on to find out more about some of the new additions to the #FlyFam…

It’s a perfect night. The band on stage has been blowing up the indie blogs. You’ve got drink specials galore. And yet, the floor isn’t full. This happens at some of the best venues across the country because fans simply don’t know about the show. In fact, 40% of tickets go unsold due to lack of awareness.

Ticketfly and Google are working together to fix that. Today, Google introduced a search feature which will make it easier than ever for fans to discover and attend great events any night of the week. Here’s how:

Venue events: When fans type in the name of a venue, their screens will populatewith a calendar of upcoming events and helpful details including on-sale dates and ticket availability.

Artist schedules: When fans type the name of their favorite artist into Google, they’ll get a list of concert dates and venue details right at the top of their screen.

Easy ticketing: Events link directly to ticket purchase pages so buying a ticket is always just a click away.

Starting today, the feature is available globally on desktop and mobile, and is integrated across Google platforms, meaning fans can find concert details directly within Google’s search apps and receive artist event reminders with Google Now cards.

If you’re partnering with Ticketfly, we’ve already integrated this feature into Google’s search results for you. It’s just one more way we’re helping you sell more tickets, and helping fans find the shows they love.

Festivals. From Burning Man to Pitchfork, these open air kaleidoscopes of dawn-to-dusk entertainment are more popular than ever, with new ones popping up all the time. They’ve always been an important part of what we do at Ticketfly — our CEO Andrew produced festivals for more than a decade, and even co-founded some himself. To help festivals around the continent become even more successful, we’re bringing on industry veteran and longtime friend of the ‘fly Jeff Kreinik as our new Head of Festivals.

We can’t think of anyone better suited than Jeff to take our festivals business to the next level. Jeff has spent more than twenty years in the music industry and is an expert in every aspect of the business — from ticketing and marketing to event promotion and production. For the past two years, Jeff served as COO for HUKA Entertainment, a Ticketfly partner and the company behind many renowned events in North America. Prior to that, during his eight years at Front Gate Tickets, Jeff signed and helped promote numerous top festivals in the United States.

Festivals are one of the fastest growing segments of the live events industry: There are more than 800 North American festivals in the music category alone. We already provide ticketing and marketing technology to more than 100 of them, including the Pitchfork Music Festival, Toronto Festival of Beer, Bristol Renaissance Faire, and a certain notable dusty get-together. Members of the Ticketfly team across every department have supported festivals from every angle, from talent buying and marketing to on-site operations. This hands-on experience serves as a constant reminder of the challenges faced by festival promoters today, and as a catalyst for building technology that makes life better for fans and promoters alike. We’re busy rethinking every aspect of the festival-going experience, from getting tickets to buying food, drinks, and merch at the event.

“There’s a huge opportunity to leverage technology to improve the festival experience for everyone involved, and Ticketfly is in a great position to lead the way,” says Jeff. “They have deep roots in the space and an inspiring vision for the future. I couldn’t be more excited about joining the team.”

Thanks, Jeff! And we couldn’t be more excited about having you and your team on board to help us create a great experience for promoters that helps them work better and smarter, while also making it easier for fans to find and enjoy great festivals.

Andrew, our CEO, agrees: “Festivals are already a big part of our business, but with the combination of our experience and technology, Ticketfly can make an even more powerful impact. It takes an industry veteran and high caliber leader to spearhead these endeavors, and we couldn’t be happier to have Jeff on board.”

It’s an old cliché that everything is bigger in Texas, but when it comes to live music, the saying definitely holds true. From famously “weird” Austin, where Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings took country back from the slick Nashville sound, to Houston’s red-hot hip hop scene (Bun B for mayor!), live music is at the heart of the Texas way of life. We’re thrilled to be working with some of the best Texan promoters and venues around, including some big names who came on in 2014. And with so many more great potential partners here in Texas, we don’t expect anything less in 2015.

As if it were even possible, Portland just got a little bit cooler. Our friends over at the Aladdin Theater and Mississippi Studios have launched a new venue—Revolution Hall—in Southeast Portland’s Buckman neighborhood. It’s housed in the former auditorium of historic Washington High School, the second high school built in Portland, originally constructed during the Industrial Revolution. The long-vacant building’s fate hung in the balance, until a local developer, Venerable Properties, purchased the building last year and reached out to Mississippi Studios founder Jim Brunberg with an opportunity to save it.